Author Description

Excerpt from Baccalaureate Address: Delivered at the Annual Commencement of Geneva College, August 4, 1841 The practical value of the study of Mathematics, and its importance in relation to public improve ments and the progress of the arts, are important considerations in vindicating its claim to a place in a system of liberal education. These considerationsmerely however do not separate it from other studies, which are strictly professional, and could we urge no more than this, Mathematics mlght, like the law, be regarded as a professional study of the high est importance to be pursued by surveyors, naviga tors and engineers, but not entitled to demand of the general student a very careful study of its higher mysteries. Its claim to the important place, which it holds in a system of liberal education, is grounded on its peculiar fitness as a means of intellectual dis cipline, and its necessity, in connexion with other means, for the full developement of the powers of the understanding in their just proportions. The study of Language is important as a means of disciplining the mind to moral reasoning, and fur nishes examples of it in the shape most convenient, as it seems to me, for elementary instruction. The province of demonstration is occupied in a great measure by Mathematics, and it is unquestionably in this science that we find its simplest forms, and the means of training the mind most successfully to the exactness of demonstrative reasoning. Although a taste for mathematical reasoning may create a de mand for it in cases, in which it is impracticable, and beget a sceptical dissatisfaction, in unbalanced minds, with other reasoning; yet by exhibiting in the clearest manner and under the simplest forms, the true nature of demonstration, the study of this sci ence may lead to the detection of the obstacles, which stand in the way of its extension to other prov inces of human knowledge, and thus to their removal. About the Publisher Forgotten Books